Death Borrowed
by Caepio
Summary: Post-Second Battle of Philippi and Brutus' death. Antony's reflection on the nature of death and a conversation between Antony and Octavius on the fate of Brutus' body. Antony's POV. Slight Brutus/Antony. Rated M for explicit descriptions of death and war, just to be safe.


The ground was cold. It seemed wrong that that was the only thing that Antony could notice, or feel. But it was. The earth was hard and icy where he stood, the grass trampled by hundreds of passing feet. And he was cold. So cold. It was a realism he wished didn't exist. Wished could, instead, match the surrealism, and almost dazedness that he thought he should feel. But he was still. Still and cold. And it was like a knife in his side - _just wrap your hands around it, wrench it out, you'll heal - _But there was no knife. Not in his hands at least. And he had no way of grasping reality and wrenching that from his consciousness. Too late for that now.

He could feel Octavius' gaze on him, watching him as he stood, staring sightlessly across the battlefield. The earth was muddy, churned up by horses' hooves and mixed with their blood. He was right at the farthest edge of the field, just where the fighting had ended. A man lay dead on the ground, his head half separated from his body by a swordsmen's stroke. He could see the white bone of his spine, stark against the congealing blood.

The sun was rising. He could see it's dim grey light in the pools of churned up blood and water that scattered the field. It was grey and subdued, the clouds heavy over the earth. There had been clear skies just two days before and Antony had not slept since then. The dawn reminded him that this was the second that he had stood awake for, and he didn't want to be there to see it. Not if it meant Brutus was dead. Not if it was because he'd spent the night sleepless, searching for his body. _If I'd come sooner, if I'd known where to look_- But he hadn't. And Brutus was dead on the ground. Not here though. Not lying lost amongst all theses dead bodies and death-borrowed faces. No. Not here. _His_ body was separate and apart. The one, almost clean-cut wound in his side all the more hideous for that. He could be alive, but for that one wound. That one, self inflicted, wound. Except for the pale, bloodless tinge of his skin, he looked it. His hair was tangled with the mud of the battlefield - but then so was Antony's. Why should that mean that Brutus was dead and his lover- his lover was still alive to stare at his body, his breath catching with tears that still would not come.

_What now_? He didn't want to answer that. God. If he could just avoid that question till the end, he would. But there was Octavius, the sound of the mud sticking to his caliga with every step clearly audible even beneath the cries of carrion crows. The boy had no right to stand on this field in soldier's gear, standing over the bodies of dead enemies, like he was the one who'd claimed a victory over them. What had he done but run from the first fight, and let Antony take the brunt of the second? No. Not let. Forced. The boy was a coward, and inept as a soldier, relying on better leaders to win his battles for him. This victory was Antony's doing. Brutus' death was indirectly Antony's doing. But the thing that had forced them all here- was politics. Politics and the idiotic, heart-breaking, force of ideals. They shattered reality. Left everything cold and bone-white. Severed heads in the mud all because of _ideals_.

Antony bowed his head, his long hair falling around his face, hiding his expression from view as he bared his teeth against an angry, shaken sob - hot tears unshed but still pricking at the corners of his eyes. _Not on a battlefield - don't cry - don't break down over this - _Don't let salt water be added to the dead-men field of victory_._ This wasn't anyone's fault - this wasn't any one person's fault - this was the fault of ideas, uncontrollable, destructive ideas and ambition. Antony never wanted the confusion of that world - never wanted anything less that the black and white of the battlefield. He hated that even that was gone now. How could anything about this field be black and white? And everything was descending, falling, sliding, into sickening grayness - _this couldn't be reality_. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Stop fucking dreaming and wake up. Wake up from reality.

There had to have been another way this could have ended.

_I told you, I didn't have a choice_. That would have been Brutus' response, _I didn't have a choice_.

_You didn't have a choice? I should have done more to give you one - I should have forced you to see that there was one -_

_Ideals don't work that way. You knew me too well to think they do. Did you think I didn't know what I was doing? Did you think think I thought this would end well? It's not how the καλοσ works, Antony. There's a pattern, and we follow it. It's fate. And I was never afraid of that._

And Antony did know him too well. He knew him so well that an answer came naturally, an answer from someone else's thoughts, that he'd held as close as his own. How could Brutus be dead if Antony could still feel the thread of his thoughts? Imagine him in the line of his own self-questioning and answering?

"I thought I would have the head sent back to Rome - thrown at the foot of Caesar's statue." Octavius' words hung in the air, fading into silence before Antony could fully register what he'd hear the boy say. Horrifying how cool his voice sounded. He'd come to stand next to Antony, his gaze darting analytically across the dead body several feet away, like he was imagining what the severed spinal chord of Brutus' body would look like when he'd done what he'd suggested. "It would be appropriate."

"Disrespectful, don't you think?" Antony said, his tone making the boy's seem warm and congenial in comparison. It wasn't a question - it was a judgement and a condemnation, and Octavius gaze shot sharply up to his.

"Disrespectful?"

"Yes. Disrespectful of him and what he tried to stand of. Say what you will about Cassius and the others, but Brutus never acted for anything that wasn't honorable."

"And do you really want the people to see it that way? I don't honestly care what happens to his body, but his head should be sent back to Rome."

"No."

Octavius looked at Antony surprise, as if he'd misheard him, "No?"

"No," Antony repeated, sharply, dangerously, "It will not. He will have an honorable burial, and if you will not see to it - I will."

"After the disrespect he showed in the treatment of my father's body? You yourself said Caesar resembled a beast hunted down by a pack of hunters when they'd finished with him"

"You say that about Brutus - Yet you're the one cutting up his body and deciding where to send each _part._"

Octavius stared at him for a moment, his pale eyes widening slightly before he turned away, putting on a tone of disinterest, "Is this really worth fighting over?"

"It was to him. He's dead. He lost Rome to you, he lost the Republic to you - and I'm not letting you dishonor him because of some stupid propagandist whim about your so-called father."

"Us." Octavius said coldly, "He lost the Republic to us."

"As if I need reminding." Antony said bitterly, running a hand roughly through his hair, his body tense with anger, "I can't pretend that what we did was right."

"You have to."

"And if I refuse?" Antony said, turning his gaze on Octavius, "What then? What the fuck could you possibly do if I refuse?"

"I wouldn't advise it."

"I don't give a damn."

"Then we'd be at war, I suppose." Octavius returned icily.

"Really? That doesn't sound very _advisable_."

"I beat you at Mutina."

Antony laughed, his tone hollow, ringing with sarcasm, "No, Pansa and Hirtius beat me at Mutina. They're dead now. So good luck with repeating that miracle."

Octavius refused to respond to that, crossing his arms as if cold and staring at the battlefield a moment longer before abruptly turning to go, "Now is not the time to discuss this. Brutus' body is in your control at any rate- do as you please. I'm tired of this childishness." He walked away, briskly swinging himself up onto his horse, turning back to the camps before Antony could respond.

The sun had risen. The edges of the distant mountains burned with it's light but it was not enough to touch the thick miasma that hung over the battlefield. The dead were being gathered up from the field, bodies flung onto the funeral pyres that were sparking up all around him. He crossed his arms against the chill on the field and watched in silence; the cold feeling spreading through him prompted by the prospect of having to watch as flames licked across Brutus' body. An honorable burial. Did he have the strength to watch that? He knew what it looked like for a body to burn. He'd watched at Caesar's funeral pyre. He'd watched his father's when he was 11. It was a slow process. He'd seen it often enough to know that. And it wasn't right to leave before it was finished. The fire would catch at their clothes, the funeral shroud briefly flashing up around them until it had burned to nothing, and the flames started to consume the body - too clearly visible.

For some there was always a twinge of reciprocal pain and almost fear at that. That for an instant the spectator couldn't help but imagine that it was their body, what it would be like for that to happen to them. In this imagining they always thought that they would be able to feel it, cold philosophy going straight out of their minds. For Antony- it was always the thing that offered the final proof that this was no longer a person he' d spoken with, walked with, fought alongside. It was just a dead, lifeless image, that couldn't feel, couldn't see, couldn't speak to cry out at the pain of the fire even if it could feel. That, was death. That was where the horror of it came from. Not the thought of what came after, if you believed the philosophers and the priests. Not the pain of the thing itself happening. It was this - the familiar turned strange. Nonexistence creeping through the vessel that had held life. Perhaps 'death-borrowed' wasn't the right term for it. Life had borrowed mortality briefly, and this, was the end.

He didn't move from where he stood, the soldiers moving around him to collect the bodies, lifting the soldier with the severed spine, his head lolling sickeningly as he was heaved over the shoulder of a legionary, his body thrown down into the flames of another pyre, already weighted down by the bodies of his comrades - if a dead body could still have the possessive and a gender given to it. It was like the stage cleared after a tragedy. The bodies gone, the blood seeping into the ground, ready for the next atrocity of human invention to take place.

The flames caught quickly, the skin blackening, the bones showing through, covered in ash, Antony watched it happen. The muscle and skin that had still held the soldier's head to his body were burned through, and the connection broke, the head falling to the ground, a half burnt, unrecognizable thing- Antony turned sharply away. That involuntary motion answering his original question for him, the memory of Octavius' imagined appropriation of Brutus' face onto that body, for a brief moment, making him sick. No. He did not have the strength. To watch some unnamed soldier who he had never known, that was just a part of war. But Brutus? To see Brutus' body that he knew so well - as well as his own - to see it burnt like that, made unrecognizable and strange. That, he could not stand to see.


End file.
